Together
Together: Loneliness, Health and What Happens When We Find Connection by Vivek Murthy
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
There seemed to be a general thread of loneliness when Dr Murthy travelled the United States. It wasn't explicit but a dark thread that ran through more obvious issues.
Feeling connected is human nature, it is fundamental to us. The benefits are unrivalled, it is a healing power.
When we connect more, through reaching out to strangers and having meaningful interactions, our lives are more fulfilled.
🎨 Impressions
In a world that is slowly becoming more disconnected, especially relevant with COVID-19, it is important we understand the loneliness condition on our hands. We can change this, we can become more connected and when we do there are great benefits. I hadn't appreciated the full impact and had a limited understanding of loneliness - this book increased my awareness of it. However, some points are repeated but the first 30 pages or so are outstanding and a must-read.
Who Should Read It?
If you want to increase your understanding of how togetherness can significantly impact everyone's lives, and how simple changes can result in lasting positive benefits. This, along with Lost Connections, are the best books I have come across which cover this subject area.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Human connection is the foundation on which we build everything else.
Connection is our evolutionary birth right. Our greatest moments of joy involve other people, the birth of a child, finding love, reunions with dear friends. And a moment of greatest sorrow often involves separation and loss of those connections, the death of a loved one, a romantic break up, an irreconcilable dispute with a close friend.
We are hardwired for connection, as we demonstrate every time we come together around a common purpose or crisis.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Issue of Loneliness
When Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States, travelled around the country identifying issues to focus on, there was one recurring topic, that was different from the rest. It wasn’t a frontline complaint. It wasn’t even identified directly as a health ailment. Loneliness ran like a dark thread through many more obvious issues that people brought to his attention, like addiction, violence, anxiety, and depression.
In some cases, loneliness was driving health problems. In others, it was a consequence of the illness and hardships that people were experiencing. It wasn’t always easy to tease out cause-and-effect, but clearly there was something about our disconnection from one another that was making people’s lives worse than they had to be.
In these instances and in so many others, I could see the vital role that social connections can play when individuals, families, and community face difficult problems. While loneliness engenders despair and even more isolation, togetherness raises optimism and creativity. When people feel they belong to one another their lives are stronger, richer and more joyful.
And yet, the values that dominate modern culture instead elevate a narrative of the rugged individualist in the pursuit of self-determination. They tell us that we alone shape our destiny.
Many were embarrassed to admit how alone they felt. The shame is particularly acute in professional cultures, like a law and medicine, who promote self-reliance as a virtue.
No group, no matter how educated, wealthy, or accomplished, seemed to be exempt.
Many people described what they were feeling as a lack of belonging. They tried to do things about it. Many have joined social organisations and moved to new neighbourhoods. They worked in open office settings and went to happy hours. But the sense of being at home remained elusive. They missed the foundation of home that is genuine connection with other people. To be at home is to be known. It is to be loved for who you are. It is to share a sense of common ground, common interests, pursuits, and values with others who truly care about you. And community after community, he met people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.
Building a more connected world holds the key to solving these and many more of the personal and societal problems confronting us today.
It’s a universal condition that affects all of us directly or through the people we love. The irony is that the antidote, human connection, is also a universal condition. We are hardwired for connection, as we demonstrate every time we come together around a common purpose or crisis.
When we strengthen our connection with one another, we are healthier, more resilient, more productive, more vibrantly creative, and more fulfilled. Murthy has come to realise that social connection stands out as a largely unrecognised and under appreciated force for addressing many of the critical problems we are dealing with, both as individuals and as a society. Overcoming loneliness and building a more connected future is an urgent mission that we can and must tackle together.
Many people think of loneliness is isolation, but there is a difference between these two terms. Loneliness is a subjective feeling that your lacking in the social connections you need. It can feel like being stranded, abandoned, or cut off for people with whom you belong – even if you’re surrounded by other people. What is missing when you’re lonely is the feeling of closeness, trust, and the affection of genuine friends, loved ones, and community.
Other Notes:
Why We Need Connection:
Such hypervigilance can be life-saving in moments of acute danger, but it places a lot of stress on the body. Nor is it sustainable for long periods. However, that time limit feature alone helped motivate the stranded to quickly re-join their tribes many thousand of years ago. Over the millennia's, this hyper vigilance is in response to isolation that became embedded in our nervous system to reduce the anxiety we associate with loneliness. When we feel lonely, our bodies are trying to react as if we were to save ourselves under threat when surrounded by wild animals and members of alien tribes. When loneliness persists, the same stress hormones that aimed to provide short-term protection instead begin to produce long-term destruction as it increases cardiovascular stress and inflammation throughout the body.
Whilst our bodies stress response to loneliness is designed to increase our chances of survival, it can do just the opposite when it lasts too long or when it comes on suddenly and severely.
Culture and its Impact
I find it helpful to think of culture as the bowl in which relationships form. Depending on its size and shape, this bowl is bound to change the experience both of togetherness and loneliness.
Picture an individualised culture as a very wide bowl of modest depth where people from all different backgrounds wonder around, occasionally striking up friendships and finding kindred spirits but also spending lots of time apart. The shape of the bowl means that we’re rarely forced together. There’s plenty of room for everyone to choose their own path but whether we find compassion to join and help us on our path, depends on how lucky and undetered we are to reach out to strangers. While the culture has so much room for exploration, loneliness in this wide bowl can feel like aimless drifting.
The bowl of the more traditional collectivist culture, on the other hand, is narrow and deep. Common ground is literal and established at birth. People in this bowl live together for generations without much space to wander. All different ages and personalities match closely, often standing on one another shoulders or holding one another up. People are physically as well as socially close, and that closeness is culturally cherished. In this bowl, loneliness can feel like a tight squeeze.
The tantalizing question is whether it’s possible to create a third bowl that brings together the best of the other two. In the third bowl, the sense of common ground will be just as solid as a traditional culture, but individuals will bond on the basis of personal choice, interests, and ideas, rather than primarily circumstance of birth. This cultural container would preserve individual freedom of expression so people can be who they are and interact with others as they wish and need to, with solitude as desired, but it also would offer structure to prevent loneliness by engendering connection and trust in providing opportunities. Think broad and deep with pockets for bonding. These pockets would catch people and give them a place to call home, s individuals don’t fall through the cracks.
Individuals and Reaching Out to Strangers
The real problem, though, is not knowing who you are as an individual the first time you’re expected to meet the wide world as an individual.
Many of us sink blindly into work and technology, without even realising what we’re missing. It’s here where we feel less connected. All of our experiences deepen our connection with ourselves and they remind us that we are part of something more interconnected that we can fathom. This is both humbling and consoling. Each of us has a lot to feel grateful for. We each have a lot to offer. And when we reach out to one another from a place of self knowledge and compassion, we have the power to transform our lives and heal the world.
Many of us misguidedly assume that strangers don’t want to be approached. It’s one of the reasons we refrain from chatting with people in line at the grocery store. We tell her selves we don’t want to impose or intrude. We worry they will think we’re weird to initiate a conversation. The truth, however, is that even those who do want to be left alone will welcome friendly interaction. The data also suggests that we are happier when we take the initiative to connect with them.
Murthy, who tends towards introversion, conducted an informal study of his own lately whenever working at a coffee shop or café. He'll push himself to smile and strike up conversations with people working alongside him. Then, rather than pack up all my belongings each time he wants to get some water or use the restroom, he ask a stranger to watch his bags and papers. No one has ever let him down. The first time he did this, he was struck by how good it felt to place his trust in someone and ask for help. But the response of the people he has asked has surprised him even more. One young man said to him when he came back 'thank you for asking me to watch your things and for trusting me. Most people wouldn’t do that. But it felt good'. The whole interaction takes next to no time, but the positive affect resonated with him for hours. It made the café feel more familiar and less impersonal. That’s what the kindness of strangers can do for us.
Concluding Points:
Connection is our evolutionary birth right. Our greatest moments of joy involve other people, the birth of a child, finding love, reunions with dear friends. And a moment of greatest sorrow often involves separation and loss of those connections, the death of a loved one, a romantic break up, an irreconcilable dispute with a close friend.
This may be the greatest challenge face in the world today: how to build a people centred life and world. So many of the front page issues we face our made worse by and in some cases originate from disconnection. Many of these challenges are the manifestation of a deeper individual and collective loneliness.
People have found themselves pushed by their suffering to face a fundamental question, what really matters in life? Through each of their journeys, the answer became clear. Strong relationships are what matter most. They improve our health, improve our performance, and enable us to rise above differences of opinion and to come together and take on big challenges as a society. Human connection is the foundation on which we build everything else.
It is true that many people are struggling with loneliness. It is true that this is much bigger than us and is affecting the fundamental nature of our interactions with one another, and often to our detriment. But I’ve also seen that the universal drive to connect is still alive and well. It may be buried at times in every day life and strife, but it surfaces during times of crisis and it is these unexpected acts of kindness that remind us who we really are.
